CIGARETTES & ADDICTION

I have just sat through a very long wrongful death lawsuit brought against a cigarette company by the widow of a man who died from lung cancer, which she claimed was a direct result of his addiction to nicotine contained in the cigarettes he smoked.

Actually, the lawsuit was initiated by John Grisham in his novel “ Runaway Jury ” in 1996.

This book was tough to read all the way through, not unlike the task of sitting through such a lengthy trial.

This proved to be an interesting lesson in point of fact.

Living through the decades of the 50’s-60’s-& 70’s, much of the time being spent with an opened cigarette package in my shirt breast pocket, this fictional tale of a product liability trial made clear the extent to which smokers, such as myself, were enticed, addicted, and bamboozled by the tobacco industry.

Everyone seemed to acknowledge that, at some level, cigarettes were addictive, but our idea of “ addiction ” was simply looking at the act of smoking, and not at the tobacco product involved. We equated our “ addiction ” to the simple act of firing up the “ coffin nail ”, as we jokingly referred to our cork tipped, filtered, cigarette, and inhaling the “ smoke ”.

I’m sure not one of us actually suspected there was any more to the problem of cigarette smoking than our “ free will decision ” light up.

What Grisham teaches us is that the “ cigarette addiction ” we willingly accepted the blame for was something much more sinister. The “addiction” was actually added to the tobacco product in the nicotine, and that it could be intensified by the manufacturer, and, in fact that is exactly what happened.

Such engineered addiction was responsible for the reported billions of dollars of tobacco profits. With numbers like that on the table, the tobacco industry spared no expense in squashing the constant nattering of medical associations, and a long string of legal challenges to their manufacture-marketing of a product that, if used as it was designed to be used, would ultimately kill their customer base.

Well, like I said, across the years of my cigarette addiction which began at approximately age 15 yrs, and ended when I quit, at age 31 yrs, I always believed those years of cigarette smoking happened because I let myself get hooked on a habit that was my own choice, and no one else’s fault. That conclusion was arrived at, in no small measure, because of the billions of dollars the tobacco industry spent to establish the fact that smoking their product was a simple case of a “ Free Choice ” that I made when I flipped open the top of my Zippo lighter.

Their mantra was the free choice which I made……..and if you repeat something often enough, and loudly enough, a lot of people will buy into the fiction, no problem……and it was unassailable, as long as you believed the choice to smoke was freely arrived at.

Recently watched a PBS documentary on the emergence of Silicon Valley as the research center it has become. More specifically, however, this narrative centered on the eight individuals who were the core of Valley’s history.

They were led by Robert Noyce, and together they brought about Fairchild Semi-Conductor, and ultimately founded Integrated Electronics , better known as INTEL.

The point being, even in the genius incubator of Silicon Valley, the tobacco industry had its way with humankind.

In the PBS film, early meetings of Noyce and his gang portrayed them as earnest young men, all with cigarettes at the ready.

The brightest guys in our world fell for the same dumb addiction to nicotine that the rest of us bought into.